My story and Electro Hypersensitivity
In 1993 at the age of 37 I was diagnosed with a mild heart condition called HCM-Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy… quite simply put… one of the chambers of my heart had a thickening on one septum which reduced blood flow and capacity… this condition is controlled successfully by beta blockers which I will take for the rest of my life.
Concurrent with this situation I developed a condition called AFIB, atrial fibrillation. In effect my heart would lose it’s rhythm and race, slow down, add extra beats and I would always know when this was happening as I’d get a feeling in my chest. AFIB can be a serious condition because if the condition persists for prolonged periods of time blood clots can form and cause a stroke. While living in Toronto until 2003 my condition was closely monitored by an excellent cardiologist from Sunnybrook Medical Centre. There were several emergency trips to the hospital, usually around 5:00am in the morning when my afib attacks always seemed to occur… but I was always lucky as my heart always seemed to have the ability to regain sinus rhythm without the need for medical intervention.
In 2003 We moved to Waterloo Ontario and I found what I thought was a good cardiologist as he came from the Ottawa Heart Institute. One of the first things he did was to put me on an antiarrhythmic drug called Amiodarone. I took this drug for four years and while I still had occasional afib attacks they were less frequent.
In the fall of 2006 I decided to take a part time job back in broadcasting as a reporter/news anchor. Around Christmas time I began experiencing a fullness in my throat, the inability to clear my throat and I began to have symptoms that affected my ability to work in broadcasting. One morning while I was shaving I noticed my throat appeared as if there was something the size of a tennis ball lodged in it. I immediately made an appointment to see the cardiologist and his response to me was that there was nothing wrong.
By March of 2007 I had dropped more than twenty five pounds, was unable to sleep at night due to the pounding sound of my irregular heart beat in my ears. These attacks scared me as they were now lasting for hours. This was something new.
I ended up in the emergency ward at one of the local hospitals. Many of the symptoms I was having resembled a heart attack. But fortunately for me that wasn’t the case… I was in hyperthyroid storm… My thyroid was overloaded with iodine and in fact was so bloated that radiographic images were almost impossible to be taken as there was little or no place for the radioactive isotope to be absorbed into the thyroid.
My wife told me that literally overnight I had transformed from a basically healthy male adult to having the appearance of a frail old man. The intervention of an endocrinologist saved my life and by the late fall miraculously I was almost back to normal having gained back most of the weight I had lost. The miracle in all of this is that my thyroid which I was told was destroyed and that I’d have to take hormones for the rest of my life, started functioning normally again. This whole experience had been caused by a rare allergy I had to the drug Amiodarone.
Had my cardiologist truly listened to me and done a proper job of examining me when I saw him in January of 2007, I would have never had to go through this life threatening experience. Throughout all of this ordeal I sought out information on the causes of AFIB. A lot of the information I read said that things like caffeine could cause it. So I eliminated all the possible triggers I could. But still the afib persisted.
Throughout the 1990’s and into the 2000’s I had worked for a few big consumer electronics companies and was quite often sitting in an office setting under bright fluorescent lighting. I would suffer from low energy, headaches, palpitations, shortness of breath and an overall feeling of uneasiness. I had the fluorescent lights above my desk removed at one company and placed a small lamp on my desk.
Within a day the headaches and lethargy disappeared. I found this quite interesting. The other thing I clued into was that when working on the old tube computer monitors I used to get head and eye aches. Upon further examination I discovered these symptoms only occurred when the refresh rate of the monitor was at 60HZ. By simply raising the refresh rate to 72hz the symptoms disappeared.
Was I on to something here?… If I was… I didn’t truly understand what I had stumbled on.
Throughout all of the stints I have had working in the consumer electronics industry that started in the early 1990’s and continued on through 2009, I never clued into the fact that all the technologies I was selling, like cordless phones, cell phones, televisions, radios, all had one thing in common. They all emitted radiation in some form or another and I was immersed in this world not only through work but by embracing the technologies in my home.
May 31st 2011 was a day I will remember for the rest of my life. This was the day the World Health Organization reversed its position on whether or not non ionizing radiation from wireless technologies could affect the health of people. Previously the WHO said there was no effect but on May 31 they did a 180 degree turn and stated the following:
Lyon, France, May 31, 2011 The WHO/International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified radio frequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B), based on an increased risk for glioma, a malignant type of brain Cancer associated with wireless phone use. I immediately started reading and researching and calling people, asking questions and despite the announcement from the WHO, the level of denial was stronger than ever as to whether this electrosmog that we are immersed in everywhere could affect our health.
It seems the scientific community which doesn’t have a vested interest monetarily in this huge issue says we need to be careful and do more research and follow people form more than ten years as cancer in most cases has a long latency period. And the telecom Industry, to this moment continues to deny there is a potential problem, touting studies they have paid for that are riddled with vagueness, testing inconsistencies and the major problem being they haven’t followed test subjects for much more than ten years.
They don’t want to talk about where the statistics go when people are followed beyond ten years because it is scary. Never in the history of mankind has a technology been in the hands of everyone, young and old… a technology that has never been tested for long term safety as to it’s effect on our bioelectric bodies.
We are electric… all around us are different frequencies… some good… some bad… but as more and more research continues to be compiled… we are learning more with each passing day.
Which brings me to the final chapter in my adventure for now… I have had the fortune of meeting two incredible women, albeit not in person, but over the telephone. Dr. Devra Davis heads up a non profit organization called the Environmental Health Trust. She is tireless in her efforts to get the word out to people to be vigilant and seek to understand the invisible threat we are facing each and every day and the impact it will have on our lives. http://environmentalhealthtrust.org/
And then there is Dr. Magda Havas. Magda Havas is Associate Professor of Environmental & Resource Studies at Trent University where she teaches and does research on the biological effects of environmental contaminants. http://www.magdahavas.com/biography/
I have only had the opportunity to speak to Dr. Havas once but that conversation changed my life. Based on a study Dr. Havas carried out dealing with electro-sensitivity in some people when exposed to radio frequencies I decided to try an experiment in my own home. I disconnected all my cordless phones, reinstalled land lines and turned off my wifi. Was this an inconvenience… you bet it was. Before I did this I purchased some testing equipment because I wanted to see for myself just how much radiation was being generated in my home especially when I was in close contact with the emitting devices like a wireless router or a cordless phone.
After I turned these devices all off the very next day when I arose in the morning I immediately knew something was different. I felt energized and alert and over the coming days I learned to exist without wifi and without cordless phones because I needed to find out if my afib was caused by exposure to these frequencies. You should also know that I work from home so making these changes had a huge impact on my health.
As 2012 nears to a close I can tell you that I no longer suffer from afib… I can tell you that my family has accepted the challenge and made changes in our home in order to live a healthier lifestyle. We don’t know the long term effects of exposure to all the electrosmog. And while many conclusions have been stated via completed and ongoing studies we just don’t know with out a doubt why autism is on the rise for example… many studies link it to exposure of this invisible contaminant while women are pregnant… It has been demonstrated over and over that cellular damage can occur at levels far below what the government deems as safe.
And yet here in North America, more cell phone towers are constructed right in the middle of residential neighbourhoods. Children routinely go to school and spend 6-7 hours in an environment where the wifi exposure levels have been shown to not be safe… This is why I am so outraged that our safety code in Canada has not been updated since 1999… at that time the code was based on thermal heating… in other words as long as the surrounding tissue didn’t heat up more than a degree Celsius… then it was safe.
The fact that it has been demonstrated time and time again that thermal heating does not have to occur in order for cell DNA to be broken should have triggered a re-evaluation of Safety Code 6 here in Canada. It has not happened. Dr. Havas has stated that conservatively about 3% of the population has a severe reaction from exposure to all this invisible junk. She estimates 30% of the population has a moderate sensitivity but that because the sensitivity is nominal, most people wouldn’t attribute activities they are doing as being the cause of some of the symptoms they routinely experience.
Dr. Havas states that by 2017 about 50% of the population will be moderately sensitive. The effect of exposure is cumulative. In my home I have created an oasis in that I have eliminated the close exposure to stimuli that cause me issues. I also feel good about creating a healthier environment for my wife and young daughter to live in. I am not as fanatical about all of this as some people are but I know there are subtle changes we can make that can have a huge impact just by being cognizant of where we place items like clock radios, which incidentally give off a huge amount of electromagnetic radiation, how we route electrical wires around the rooms we spend time in, especially places like the bedroom where our bodies use sleep as an essential ingredient to replenish our life force. Having power cords wrapped around behind the bed where you place you head on a pillow for the night isn’t a good thing because you are in the electrical field.
Any plug on any appliance that doesn’t have three prongs is not grounded properly and emits dirty electricity.
I wrote this article for a couple of reasons.
The first is to raise awareness.
The second is to confirm there are many people like myself who suffer from the effects of exposure to this electrosmog.
We can ‘t wait for the government and the industry to do anything because right now they are still saying everything is just fine, but that’s an outright lie.
If we wait until there is 100% confirmation it will be too late.
A big part of this picture is about You becoming more aware about how you use these wonderful technologies. Learn to use them safely and not excessively. I am particularly concerned about children and teens. Too many questions are going unanswered.
Many that the industry either refuses to address or spins.
The Europeans are so far ahead of North America.
They get it!